Image Guide
We promote and celebrate our staff and students at every opportunity, and they should be the focus of our photography.
Use only high quality images. Images should not be:
- blurry
- stretched
- pixelated
Good quality University images are available in our photo library (University login required). Always preview your image to check the quality before publishing.
Images of text and complex images, like flowcharts or graphs, can present a barrier for users accessing your content. This content is effectively invisible to users of screen readers and anyone viewing the text only version of your site, for example a mobile user with images turned off. It is also impossible for search engines to index this content.
If you must include a complex image in your site then a text alternative of the essential information contained in the image is required.
You may need to do some basic editing of an image to get it ready to publish on your website. We recommend the free online editing tool Photopea and provide a simple guide to image editing using Photopea. Or you can crop and resize images in Photoshop, licences are available from Newcastle Uniiversity IT Service.
Many of our websites contain pages with grids of images. Hyperlinking the graphic or image used in a grid increases the area a user can ‘click’. This is useful for mobile users who may be trying to select links using their finger or a stylus. Image links should always be supported by links in the text of your page.
Alt text provides alternative, textual content when an image cannot be displayed or for users of screen readers. It should be descriptive, but not necessarily a literal description of the image. Think about describing what the image represents.
Our file naming conventions help you organise and keep track of the images being used across your site.
File names should:
- be short and meaningful
- be lower case
- use hyphens to separate words
To help you organise your images on your computer and in the Media Library, we recommend that you also include:
- the Photo Library ID
- a prefix for the content type the image has been cropped for, eg masthead
The ideal file name will look like this: masthead-careers-40602.jpg